ANATOMY OF TORTURE — Historian Christopher Dietrich on the 100-year-long history of American torture; Jeffrey St. Clair on the implications of giving impunity to the CIA’s torturers; Chris Floyd on how the US has exported torture to its client states around the world. David Macaray on the Paradoxes of Police Unions; Louis Proyect on Slave Rebellions in the Open Seas; Paul Krassner on the Perils of Political Cartooning; Martha Rosenberg on the dangers of Livestock Shot-up with Antibiotics; and Lee Ballinger on Elvis, Race and the Poor South. Plus: Mike Whitney on Greece and the Eurozone and JoAnn Wypijewski on Media Lies that Killed.

Mexico City.
The Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México (UACM) was founded in 2001, ostensibly by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then mayor of Mexico City, but spurred by the student strike at the much larger Universidad Autónoma Nacional de Méxic...

The Democrats just put out their platform on Latin America, and it demonstrates only the loosest connection to reality. Thus, while praising the “vibrant democracies in countries from Mexico to Brazil and Costa Rica to Chile,” as well as “historic peaceful trans...

Mexico City.
On Friday, thousands of people in Mexico City joined a mock funeral procession to mourn the “death” of Mexican democracy. They needn’t worry. The very resistance by citizens to the electoral fraud this summer – exemplified by the stude...

It’s a steamy, overcast monsoon morning in Nogales, Sonora, just across the border from the United States. I’ve come to learn more about what happens to Mexican deportees, many parents of children, who are left off by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in do...

I am constantly asked the question as to why I write with so much emotion. As a historian I should be more restrained, objective and search for the truth. When the first edition of Occupied America was published in 1972, I tri...

San Diego.
If the Mexico-US border is the most surreal international boundary in the western hemisphere – often described as the only place where the so-called “First World” meets the Third, with all the envy, prejudice and distrust that implies – ...

There have been two major Mexican earthquakes in recent years, the telluric one that killed thousands of people in 1985 and the electoral one July 1 that didn’t kill anyone but made a lot of people mad.
Emerging details of the voting reveal manipulations of Byzan...

What Americans just don’t get is that most people see history differently than they do. In order to break this down, every semester I show Robert Wuhl’s HBO special “Assume the Position 101.” Wuhl proposes that U.S. history is Pop Culture and he discusses differen...

Mexico City.
The #YoSoy132 pro-democracy movement that emerged in the weeks leading up to the Mexican election can already boast a handful of victories – having three of the four candidates appear in a third TV debate hosted by students; persuading thous...

Perhaps the most humiliating legacy of our nation-building venture in Afghanistan is the stubborn narco-state flourishing under our noses. The opium crop in Afghanistan has doubled since US forces deposed the Taliban, and the drug trade threatens to dominate the country a...

Mexico City.
Mexico could be forgiven for partying like it’s 2006. Following the election on Sunday, where Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Enrique Peña Nieto appeared to win the presidency by a 6.5% margin over leftist Andres Manuel Lo...

On the eve of Sunday’s national elections, hundreds of thousands of protesters, mostly students, stayed till midnight in marches in Mexico City and other cities. The polls opened at 8 the morning with the usual fraud and inefficiency: some polling places didn´t open ...

On the night of July 1, Enrique Peña Nieto shouted before cameras, “this Sunday, Mexico won!” The presidential candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Peña used the speech to declare himself the winner, promising an “honest” and “democrat...

Mexico City.
So the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico as a de facto dictatorship for 71 years, wins back power south of the border after a twelve-year absence. The Mexican business elite win. Foreign investment giants win. NAFT...

Mexico City.
It’s been a long time coming but the outcome of the Mexican presidential election next Sunday is no longer a sure thing. Say “gracias” to those students from the University Iberoamericana in Mexico City – alternatively written off by t...

The hopes of Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon to have the European crisis under control before he presides over the G20 Summit have been dashed. Although the immediate threat of an economic meltdown has subsided, the crisis is far from over. Continued uncertainty in G...

Mexico City.
You can blame it on those damn students. Ever since over a hundred of them at a private university, the Iberoamericana in Mexico City, ran presidential frontrunner Enrique Peña Nieto off campus with cries of “Coward!” and “Get out!” o...

Thanks to fawning coverage from the country’s ever-so-partial TV giants, Enrique Peña Nieto has been favorite for July’s Mexican presidential election for more than two years. With just over a month to go, the majority of the polls still show the Institutional Revolu...

Mexico City
So far removed from Planet Earth are the two “main” candidates for Mexico’s 2012 presidential election – one at least gets a harsh dose of reality from (supposedly) third-placed and heavily-marginalized Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – t...

Mexico City
Let’s all praise democracy! Until twelve years ago, Mexicans had to bite their collective tongue while each crooked Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) president appointed his successor via the “dedazo” – or big finger-point. But th...

Mexico’s federal election campaign officially kicked off March 30, but the contest arguably began in earnest days earlier when Pope Benedict XVI visited the right-wing stronghold of Guanajuato state. In a story worthy of Mexican surrealism, the daily La Jornada chronicl...

Mexico City
When John Paul II used to swing by Mexico – the first Pope to do so in 1979 – he went straight to Mexico City, the country’s throbbing spiritual heart; as well as the site of its most important Catholic shrine, the Basilica of Guadalupe. ...